There is a growing usage of digital storage, specifically using hard disk drives, to store personal information and digitized images/video/audio. As the personal importance of this data grows, so does the importance of reliability of the storage system used, as very often original data resides on these storage devices for extended periods of time before they can be backed up onto another media.
Expensive SCSI hard disk drives have long been used due to their high reliability over mainstream ATA or SATA based disk drives in situations where data integrity and storage reliability are important. For example, SCSI disk drives are often rated at 1 million hours MTBF (mean-time-between-failures) at 80% duty cycles, whereas the more common desktop hard disk drives are rated 600,000 hours MTBF at 20% duty cycles. Fort this reason, SCSI is often the choice in server and high end video editing workstation class computers. Further, SCSI drives are often higher performance than their lower cost ATA/SATA drive cousins. 15,000 RPM SCSI vs. 10,000 RPM SATA for the fastest drives are typical. Disk drives prices and costs have continued to drop significantly in recent years as they are increasingly used in the mainstream of computing and digital entertainment. However, performance and reliability of the lower cost disk drives still significantly lags that of SCSI. The need remains, therefore, for innovations to improve reliability in disk drives generally while avoiding the high cost of known SCSI drives.